Hat Yai, down in the south, is predominantly Muslim; Thailand is nearly 95% Buddhist. You already know where I'm going with this, don't you? Yep. People being what they are, southern Thailand is currently undergoing what is politely called an insurgency. Nobody seems really sure what the causes are, but the ex-prime minister made good use of Bush's Global War on Terror (or "GWOT" as I've heard it referred to by people with abnormally loud voices and unpleasant views on drugs and foreigners) to claim that this was a local front of the aforesaid 'war' (as did a number of other unpopular leaders around the world in the drive to reduce local dissatisfaction to a mere religious fervour by a few dissidents.) Whether it's a religious war or an excuse for a militarised government to go on an arms spending spree, the fact is that the area is unsettled and unsettling - the day I bought my train ticket to Hat Yai in March, there was a bomb in the city that killed 9 people - just one of 8 fatal incidents that month.
The train journey north covers about 920km, from south to north, through the narrow central isthmus - the Isthmus of Kra, which is really just a name out of a Pratchett sci-fi novel - or, perhaps even better, "The Devil's Neck". Take your pick. The narrowest part is just 44km wide, and for a fair part of our trip we could catch glimpses of the sea. The train itself was another of the cocoon sleepers - no window this time, though.
By the time I woke in the morning the landscape was utterly changed. The only traces left of Malaysia were in the headscarves of the women in my carriage. We were well into Buddhist Thailand. I spent most of the time gazing out the window at little wooden villages and canals and golden temples. The endless monotony of so much beauty was broken up by, well, more beauty, in the form of the railway stations, which were like wooden cottages overflowing with plants and flowers in carefully tended pots. At Hua Hin, a town I want to visit solely on the basis of having seen its train station, saffron-clad monks waited on whitewashed walls beneath roofs of bougainvillea. Because, you know, this train journey wasn't romantic enough already.
As we drew nearer to Bangkok, that city of 15 million people started to make its presence known. The tiny wooden stations were replaced by shiny, empty, marble shells, some newly built in class and steel, the flowers and statues making way for rows of wooden and plastic chairs. Shacks backed onto the railway; the condos rising in the distance had had some impact on the shack dwellers: they'd patched up their shaky walls with old banners. "Luxury one-bedroomed apartment! Move in now!" Later the tracks were lined with wooden houses blending into each other, back steps a millimetre from the first track, filled with trash and bags of glass bottles and old chairs, the cast-off debris of the lives of people themselves debris. Later I heard of how they trade from tables set up right on the tracks, and the minute the sirens wail, they take everything down in a flash and retreat to the safety of the houses until the train passes. And up ahead, the gleaming spires of commercial Bangkok. Right up to the moment we entered Hua Lamphong Station our view was broken up into this disconnected foreground/background dichotomy. And then we arrived into the station and in the joy of seeing a seating area reserved for monks and the clamour of the tuk-tuk drivers and the silence of the over-modern subway tunnel we took to reach our hotel; in the rush I forgot all about it.
@Hua Lamphong Hotel was just opposite the station: perfect for train travellers. It had a great cafe downstairs, with a sort of subverted Edwardian England kitsch - which was a good thing (the cafe, not the kitsch) as I was confined to it for the rest of the day completing a university assignment due in at 5pm GMT. Oops.
So it was only the next day that i really ventured out, and even then, I at first only made it a couple of blocks, through Chinatown to Wat Traimit Witthayaram Worawiham, or the Shrine of the Golden Buddha. It was a popular shrine, and therefore a lot of other people circled the room at the top of the steps with me, but through the crowds of hats and parasols and the occasional bowing Buddhist could be seen a serene sitting Buddha, which was, yes, golden.
Funny story. You know how clumsy movers notoriously are? Dropping pianos and the like? Well, in 1957, some Thai movers were lifting a 3-metre, 5-ton plaster statue from one temple to another, when something happened to make them drop it from a great height. Hundred-year-old statue gets smashed open... to reveal the sold gold inner statue, the appropriately named Golden Buddha. The temple that owned it must have been thrilled with their clumsy movers. It's thought it was encased in plaster to protect it from the invading Burmese; probably a good idea with 5 tons of solid gold... It;'s a testament to the power of belief that it even got to be 700 year sold - even now, there didn't seem to be much security around, although I'm sure that changes when all the tourists leave. What there was a lot of was donation boxes - about 50 of them, arranged around the room, requesting money for everything from novitiate education to building to upkeep of statues...
...to cattle...
...to everything.
Quite liked the idea of picking your destination though! (No, I didn't pay for cattle...)
Outside the complex I stood by a roadside shrine gazing out at the traffic for a while, undecided and mapless. A man in a blue uniform saw both of these lacks in me and thought he'd rectify the matter for me. Producing a map, he asked me what I'd like to see, and in response to my non-committal mumble, sketched out an itinerary for me. As an afterthought, he added in a gem store, telling me it was a famous one, only open this week to the public and I should just have a look. Then he hailed a tuk-tuk for me (from its sitting position about ten metres away), spoke to the driver about the itinerary, which now included four separate sites, and told me, "40 baht only for the driver." This is just Rm4, or about $1.50-ish. But determined to stuff down the rising tide of suspicion, in I jumped and off we sped.
The first step was for the Lucky Buddha, stored at a shrine in some back streets, 17th century buildings standing in a lovely tree-lined courtyard, completely and utterly empty. A stark contrast with the anthill of Wat Traimit. I took my shoes off and went into the Buddha's room to find that I was wrong about it being completely empty - there was a suited gentleman deep in prayer, his keys and smartphone on the carpet beside him. I hovered at the door in a misguided reluctance to interrupt his prayers, but he turned and saw me and immediately called me in, waving aside my embarrassed protests. I sat beside him for twenty minutes as he told me about the history of the Lucky Buddha and his job in Dubai and Buddhism in Africa and his export business in Dubai and the meaning of the string floating above our heads. Apparently the royal family had been here the previous week and a ceremony had been carried out to bless them and the monastery.
Finally I took pity on the waiting driver and left - just after the praying many looked at my itinerary and raved about the gem factory on it. So. Off we went, my linguistically tongue-tied driver and me, to the gem factory where I was welcomed in by a man in a gleaming suit and guided around some glass cases showing some very expensive sapphires and rubies. When I said I really wasn't going to buy anything, the smiles disappeared and I was shown the door. Literally. They pointed to the door and said, "Okay, you can go out that way." My driver asked me to look at one more place, so that he could get a free fuel coupon. I agreed under duress. I looked at sapphire earrings. I refused to buy. I was left to find my own way out.
The next step was the Golden Mount, at the base of which sprawled Wat Saket. Built on top of the ruins of an earlier shrine, a temple sits at the top of 318 shallow steps, protecting a relic of the Buddha. On the climb up, for your entertainment, there are beautiful bells and gongs and tubs of lotus flowers.
The wat was once the tallest point in Bangkok, which is easy to believe when looking out the door at the spectacular view. The modern city dominates, but like gleaming spears of defiance,a thousand red-and-gold temples rise through the grey concrete.
Back on the ground I wandered for a short while through the temple complex, where young monks strode about clutching books and bags, through tree-lined avenues. It was so peaceful I found myself thinking it would probably be rather lovely to be a monk here one day... If only there were gender equality, huh?
Back in the main area, as I gazed at a counter selling care packages for Buddhists to buy for the monks, it dawned on me that it was way past the appointed time, and yet my tuk-tuk driver was nowhere to be seen. After a little more wandering and more than a bit of wondering, I approached a taxi driver, who laughed and told me that the driver was long gone, looking for someone who'd actually buy the gems. Of course the fare, which I'd brushed away suspicions about, was inconsequential, and my driver had abandoned it, preferring to spend his time chasing other, more pliable tourists.
I grinned and hailed an empty cab for a trip back to my hotel.
Later I learnt that even the smartly dressed man in the temple was part of an elaborate scam to get me to buy gems at a vastly inflated price in the hopes of reselling them for a profit in my own country. The driver got 200 baht from each shop merely for bringing me there, but the big prize is tourists who spend thousands of dollars, their greed getting the better of them. In the end though, I got a free ride around the city through back roads I wouldn't otherwise have seen, and the driver got a few baht for his pains. I just wish he'd told me instead of leaving me wandering round the carpark like an idiot! It didn't put me off Bangkok, but it did make me long for the simplicity of Laos.
Luckily, I was the proud owner of a train ticket north, for that very night...
The first step was for the Lucky Buddha, stored at a shrine in some back streets, 17th century buildings standing in a lovely tree-lined courtyard, completely and utterly empty. A stark contrast with the anthill of Wat Traimit. I took my shoes off and went into the Buddha's room to find that I was wrong about it being completely empty - there was a suited gentleman deep in prayer, his keys and smartphone on the carpet beside him. I hovered at the door in a misguided reluctance to interrupt his prayers, but he turned and saw me and immediately called me in, waving aside my embarrassed protests. I sat beside him for twenty minutes as he told me about the history of the Lucky Buddha and his job in Dubai and Buddhism in Africa and his export business in Dubai and the meaning of the string floating above our heads. Apparently the royal family had been here the previous week and a ceremony had been carried out to bless them and the monastery.
Finally I took pity on the waiting driver and left - just after the praying many looked at my itinerary and raved about the gem factory on it. So. Off we went, my linguistically tongue-tied driver and me, to the gem factory where I was welcomed in by a man in a gleaming suit and guided around some glass cases showing some very expensive sapphires and rubies. When I said I really wasn't going to buy anything, the smiles disappeared and I was shown the door. Literally. They pointed to the door and said, "Okay, you can go out that way." My driver asked me to look at one more place, so that he could get a free fuel coupon. I agreed under duress. I looked at sapphire earrings. I refused to buy. I was left to find my own way out.
The next step was the Golden Mount, at the base of which sprawled Wat Saket. Built on top of the ruins of an earlier shrine, a temple sits at the top of 318 shallow steps, protecting a relic of the Buddha. On the climb up, for your entertainment, there are beautiful bells and gongs and tubs of lotus flowers.
The wat was once the tallest point in Bangkok, which is easy to believe when looking out the door at the spectacular view. The modern city dominates, but like gleaming spears of defiance,a thousand red-and-gold temples rise through the grey concrete.
Back on the ground I wandered for a short while through the temple complex, where young monks strode about clutching books and bags, through tree-lined avenues. It was so peaceful I found myself thinking it would probably be rather lovely to be a monk here one day... If only there were gender equality, huh?
Back in the main area, as I gazed at a counter selling care packages for Buddhists to buy for the monks, it dawned on me that it was way past the appointed time, and yet my tuk-tuk driver was nowhere to be seen. After a little more wandering and more than a bit of wondering, I approached a taxi driver, who laughed and told me that the driver was long gone, looking for someone who'd actually buy the gems. Of course the fare, which I'd brushed away suspicions about, was inconsequential, and my driver had abandoned it, preferring to spend his time chasing other, more pliable tourists.
I grinned and hailed an empty cab for a trip back to my hotel.
Later I learnt that even the smartly dressed man in the temple was part of an elaborate scam to get me to buy gems at a vastly inflated price in the hopes of reselling them for a profit in my own country. The driver got 200 baht from each shop merely for bringing me there, but the big prize is tourists who spend thousands of dollars, their greed getting the better of them. In the end though, I got a free ride around the city through back roads I wouldn't otherwise have seen, and the driver got a few baht for his pains. I just wish he'd told me instead of leaving me wandering round the carpark like an idiot! It didn't put me off Bangkok, but it did make me long for the simplicity of Laos.
Luckily, I was the proud owner of a train ticket north, for that very night...
No comments:
Post a Comment